The Curse of the Golden Touch

by G M Mckay

  “You never know, they might surprise you,” I said quietly. It always saddened me a little when people who loved horses only thought of the riding and grooming and missed out on building a trusting, playful friendship. In my eyes, that was the very best part of being around horses.

  “Oh, don’t mind her,” Xan said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t trust my horses loose either. Jilly can get any horse to follow her around like a dog. That’s what happens when you spend all your time in the barn and have no social life at all,” Xan teased.

  I stuck my tongue out at him playfully and shrugged. He’d definitely hit the nail on the head there.

  “You should have seen her with my old horse, Teddy. I think he would have done anything to please her. She even taught him to bow on command. That didn’t impress the judge very much at the end of our dressage test. I can tell you.”

  We all laughed again, but I felt another pang when I remembered what a sweet, trusting horse Teddy had been. I hoped he’d found a good, permanent home with someone who loved and appreciated him more than Xan had.

  Finally, with all the horses out, we were able to get to work cleaning stalls.

  “I’m so sorry, Jill,” Estelle said wearily as I came back pushing my second wheelbarrow load. “I’m going to have to go lie down. This has been a little much for me.”

  “I’ll escort you back,” Xan said quickly, gathering her crutches. “You’ll be okay here by yourself, Jilly?”

  “Um …” I looked down the long line of dirty stalls dubiously, “I suppose ...”

  “Great,” he said, tossing his pitchfork aside, “we’ll see you at lunch.”

  Sighing heavily at his typical Xan behaviour, I resigned myself to a full day of heavy labour. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to clean our stalls at home, since there were paid employees to do the grunt work, but I helped out anyway whenever Mother was otherwise occupied. So I knew what I was doing.

  Still, this wasn’t like cleaning our impeccable stable at home where every stall was picked out three or four times a day. Besides Bally and Rigel’s stalls, the rest of them hadn’t been cleaned in days; the straw bedding was heavy and wet and the sharp smell of ammonia made my eyes water.

  By the time I was a quarter of the way through, my arms ached, sweat beaded my forehead, and there was unidentified green smear across one cheek.

  “Do you need a hand?”

  “Gil,” I said, looking up with undisguised relief. “I’d love some help, thank you. This stuff is heavy.”

  We worked in companionable silence for a few minutes.

  “Jilly, something’s been bothering me about the other night.”

  I looked up at him in surprise. Surely, he wasn’t embarrassed about falling asleep in my room. It had been completely innocent; we hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe he was ashamed about all the snoring he’d done.

  “How did you fall off Bally?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. I hadn’t expected that at all. “I don’t actually know. That night is all mixed up in my head; I still can’t sort out what’s a dream and what’s not.”

  Gilbert leaned on his pitchfork and waited patiently for me to go on.

  “I mean, what I do remember doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you think happened from beginning to end and don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. We can piece it together later.”

  “Well,” I hesitated, “I remember us driving with the horse trailer; I know we came here with Xan to see Great Aunt Ruth. Then there’s a big gap until Bally and I found Xan and Estelle in the woods. I remember galloping to find help for Estelle and arriving at that fork in the road. This is where it gets really strange. This lady in a dress suddenly rode up beside me and pointed out the right road to me; that part had to be a dream. Then I think I remember galloping up to the house. I thought I stopped just in front of the lawn, but then after that it’s all muddled. I guess that’s when I fell off Bally. There were people there and … and I think I remember lying in the front hallway. That’s it until I woke up in bed.”

  “Bally had his reins draped over a branch, Jilly. Your helmet was sitting on a bench nearby,” he said solemnly, “and his stirrups had been run up.”

  “Oh?” I said in surprise. “Well, I suppose someone found us there and took care of him. A horse person would have probably run his stirrups up and set my helmet somewhere safe so he didn’t step on it.”

  “What horse person? Estelle was hurt and I can’t see any of the others doing it.”

  “Xan? Maybe he saw Bally on his way in?”

  “No, I asked him. There wasn’t a mark on your helmet, either.” Gil stabbed his pitchfork into the dirty straw. “Not even dust. There’s a lump on your head the size of an orange. If your helmet had been on when you got that injury, it would have been crushed or dented. It was pristine.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “so, what are you saying? I took my helmet off for some reason and then I fell off? Maybe I was on the ground and Bally spooked and knocked me over.”

  “Maybe,” he said grimly. “Or maybe something else happened.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not really sure, Jilly. I just think we should be on guard just in case. There’s something funny going on here.”

  I thought about that drugged glass of orange juice and my terrifying nightmares and suppressed a little shiver.

  With two people cleaning, the work went much more quickly and soon, the stable was spic and span again, the stalls deeply bedded in clean, fluffy straw, the water buckets scrubbed and filled, and each manger piled with fragrant, green hay.

  By the time we were done sweeping the aisle, my stomach was rumbling loudly for lunch.

  “I don’t think I want to put a helmet on yet, Gil, my head’s still too sore,” I admitted. “Do you think you could ride Bally for me today? I don’t want him having too many days off and it gives us an excuse to check out the fancy indoor arena.”

  Gil shot me a sideways look. “You don’t want Xan to ride him?”

  “Oh no,” I said quickly. “Bally wouldn’t like that at all. Besides, he’s used to you. Please?”

  “Well, when you ask so nicely, how can a guy resist?”

  “Exactly,” I said, elbowing him gently in the ribs. “You are putty in my hands.”

  Gil’s smile dropped away and he sighed heavily. “Sometimes, that’s what I worry about.”

  Chapter 6

  We stopped outside the barn to check on Bally and found him still knee-deep in grass, happily doing his part to keep the lawn mowed.

  I went over and gave him a hug, then leaned against his broad, warm shoulder and happily gazed around. Even though, as vacations go, this one was a bit of a disaster, it was still so nice to be away from home.

  I closed my eyes for a second, basking in afternoon sunshine, and when I opened them, I found Gil watching me with a smile on his face.

  “What?” I asked, smiling back at him automatically. Right then he looked like the carefree old Gil of my childhood.

  “It’s just nice to see you happy and relaxed again. You remind me of the girl I used to know.”

  “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

  “Really?” he asked, the smile slipping off his face. “Then what changed, Jilly?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked in bewilderment. “Nothing changed. I mean, I guess I’ve been sad about the whole Frederick thing—”

  “No, not that,” he said impatiently, “you changed long before that. I know you don’t like to talk about it, Jilly, but after that day we nearly drowned, the day Nanny was fired, something changed. I wasn’t allowed to see you for months, and then you got sick and were whisked away to Europe. When you came home it was like you’d become an entirely different person.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. We never spoke about the accident or what happened afterward. It was much too painful, even after all this time.

&
nbsp; “I didn’t change, Gil,” I said slowly. “I mean, I was upset about Nanny of course, but I was still me. I’m still the same person.”

  “Were you? Are you?” he asked bluntly, looking deep into my eyes.

  “Well, I …” I swallowed hard. It was true that I’d never felt quite myself again after that summer. I guess I’d put a big piece of myself away with the rest of my childhood things, like the silly ghosts I’d made up. But that was just a part of growing up, wasn’t it?

  “Jilly, before you left you were brilliant. You were curious about the whole world and how it worked. You were a budding scientist, a writer, and an inventor; you were my genius friend. You could have done anything. But it was like you lost all interest for the world that summer and threw all the enthusiasm you had left into riding. I think the single thing you were interested in after that was Bally.”

  “Hey, that’s not true,” I said, feeling a little offended. I was still interested in things other than horses. I liked lots of things like … well, food, and walking out on the hills with Bally, and brushing Bally and riding him, and planning his training schedule, and planning for shows. Hmm, maybe Gil had a slight point.

  “Do you remember you had those stacks of notebooks,” Gil said suddenly, surprising me. “You wrote your ghost stories and your experiments and your hypotheses, and all sorts of things in them non-stop. You had so many dreams for the future. You shared them with me almost every night. And then it just ended.”

  “It did?” I asked uncertainly, trying to remember. That time of my life always felt foggy to me when I tried to recall it in detail.

  “What did you did do with them?”

  “The notebooks? I have no idea. I switched bedrooms when I came home from Europe. Mother must have tossed them out or packed them up somewhere. I haven’t thought of them in years.”

  “They were important to you,” Gil said stubbornly, “and you just threw them away like everything else.”

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me at all, like I’d betrayed him somehow.

  “I … I need to go inside now, my head hurts,” I lied.

  “And that’s what you always do; change the subject when things get serious or uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, although I knew exactly what he meant. I hated arguing or discussing unpleasant things; I’d do almost anything to avoid it.

  Gil clenched his jaw and brooded in silence all the way back to the house, only grunting in response when I made vague comments about the scenery and how nice the weather was. He left me at the front door with barely a goodbye and strode off toward the woods beyond the house, leaving me behind.

  I stared sadly at his retreating back, wondering why on earth we fought about the silliest things. He was the last person I wanted to argue with, life was so good when we were getting along. And what had all that silly talk about notebooks been? Why did he care so much about the past?

  My gaze drifted to a dark clump of bracken in the nearby woods and froze. There was a man staring at me from the woods; he was too far away for me to make out his features but there was no mistaking the hostile, predatory way he stood. He took a step in my direction and every instinct in my body cried out for me to run. I felt like a field mouse watched by a hawk.

  A deep, mournful howl rose up from the woods. The man flinched and disappeared like a flash into the forest. The bracken nearby crackled and a great, massive black dog shot out of the woods, gave me a brief glance from a pair of baleful, yellow eyes and then plunged back into the forest where the man had been.

  For a moment I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but stare, but then I pulled myself together, yanked the door open and bolted inside, slamming it hard behind me.

  Chapter 7

  I stood with my back pressed firmly against the door, waiting for my wildly beating heart to find its rhythm again. What on earth had I just seen?

  Something thumped on the landing and I glanced up only to hold back my second scream of the morning. Those baleful yellow eyes again but this time crafted from intricate bits of colour. That gargantuan dog poised at the foot of the Dark Lady’s horse staring intently at me out of the glass. His eyes bored into mine almost as if he were trying to tell me something.

  I gave a half-hysterical laugh and took a deep breath.

  You are being ridiculous, I told myself firmly, getting spooked by nothing. There probably wasn’t even anything in the woods outside; just your imagination playing up again.

  I marched down the long hall toward my room, intent on changing out of my dirty barn clothes, having a good lunch, and putting the whole bizarre situation behind me when a nagging thought stopped me in my tracks.

  Slowly, reluctantly I retraced my steps to the foot of the stairs and gazed upward, already guessing what I’d find.

  The dog is facing the wrong way, I thought in dismay, he’s looking over his shoulder at the riders in the distance, just like he was when I first saw the stained glass. He was never looking at me at all. I am going crazy.

  Nausea rippled through me. What if the blow to my head had made my harmless hallucinations worse? What if I stayed this way forever, never being sure of what was real and what wasn’t? I’d spent my whole childhood living in a fantasy world; I would do anything to keep from going back that way again.

  A dim memory surfaced, unbidden, of my fourteen year old self sobbing while my mother flew into one of her famous rages. “Do you want everyone laughing at you forever, Jillian? Don’t you want to finally be friends with the other children? You have to put these silly things behind you.”

  I shook my head to clear it and walked the rest of the way to my room, wrapped in worry. I dug through my luggage until I found some clean clothes and heard a little clinking sound as I zipped my suitcase shut.

  I looked down at the dresser to see that I’d knocked one of the little horse figurines over.

  “Sorry, little one,” I said, putting it upright again. I frowned, looking down at the group of sculptures more closely. I hadn’t really noticed them before but now I realized that they were all little replicas of the rider in the painting on my wall, and of the lady in the stained-glass window. A lady in an emerald dress on a red horse. They weren’t particularly well done, just cheap porcelain figures posed in a variety of ways; sometimes the horse was rearing or standing or running, and the lady alternated between having her arm upraised or sitting quietly, staring moodily off toward the horizon.

  Great, I guess there’s no escaping her anywhere, I thought, shaking my head. Who would have so many versions of the same sculpture in one place?

  Apparently my first shower that morning had exhausted the hot water supply but I did my best with the tepid trickle while the copper pipes groaned and creaked in chorus.

  When I came out of the bathroom, my bedroom door was open and Morris was sitting propped upright in the middle of my bed, his legs stuck out in opposite directions like turkey drumsticks while he did some personal grooming.

  “Hello, silly cat,” I said to him, scratching the top of his head a few times before leaving him to it. “I wonder what you’ve been eating these last three days. I can’t see them having a supply of cat food here for you, and yet you look fat and happy. Probably dining on caviar and cream, aren’t you?”

  I loosely wove my hair into a long braid and pulled on my usual uniform of breeches and a long-sleeved shirt even though I wouldn’t be riding today. They were still the most comfortable clothes I owned.

  I padded out into the hall, my stomach rumbling. There was a light thump behind me and I turned to see Morris trotting after me, his orange, striped tail stuck straight up in the air like an exclamation mark.

  “I wonder what’s behind all these doors, Morris,” I said aloud, and on impulse I reached out and tried a handle. It turned easily and I peeked inside to see a guest room almost identical to my own, only this one was furnished in mossy green rather than red. The dresser nearest the
door had a set of little horse figurines just like mine did.

  Weird, I thought, stepping closer to look at the tiny statues. Why would she have so many copies of the same statue?

  I picked up one of the figures and turned it over carefully, it was much nicer than the ones in my room had been. It was made of the most fragile porcelain, feeling almost hollow in my hands. It had been made with exquisite detail, even down to the expression of anger on the horse’s face. There was a tiny makers-mark stamped on the bottom but I didn’t recognize it. Mother had a lot of antiques and had dragged me all over the countryside in my youth in an effort to educate me, but I had been a poor student and had spent every moment wishing to be back at the barn.

  I put that one down and picked up the next, which was bigger, heavier and more clumsily made. It had a thickly painted set of initials at the bottom and a number that meant it was from a small batch of ten. Perhaps locally made.

  I set the figurines back in exactly the same places and backed carefully out of the room. Now my curiosity was stirred a little and I peeked into a few more doors and found them nearly identical. . All the guest rooms were decorated in their own colours; but the layouts were the same, right down to the little figurines on the dresser. By the fifth door I opened, it was starting to feel a little weird; either Great Aunt Ruth had zero imagination in decorating or she was strangely obsessed with this specific layout for some reason.

  Finally, as I neared the end of the hall, I came to a room that was different than the rest. It was a small sitting room with plump leather chairs arranged in a comfortable way around a crackling fire. I wrinkled my nose as I stepped inside. The fire must have just been recently lit because the air was tinged with the acrid smell of burning.

  A book sat splayed open and face down on a small table near the fire, the spine bent at an angle that made my book-loving-self wince. Next to it was a nearly-full cup of tea, still faintly steaming.

  “Hello?” I said tentatively, stepping into the room. A log popped in the fireplace, making me jump. “Is anyone here?”